


The First Cut Hurts Worst

by Winterling42



Series: Flesh and Blood and Dust [17]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman, Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Backstory, F/F, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-29
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-24 01:25:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6136547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterling42/pseuds/Winterling42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Angharad chases pain like she once chased water, relishing it for its rarity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Cut Hurts Worst

The first time, she used a razor, ripped apart the casing until she could slide it down her face like freedom, breathing in the pain. He’d called her face a beauty, a masterpiece. Ran his fingers along her cheeks, her lips, her forehead. This pain felt better, _cleaner_ than his touch. Angharad sat by the pool in the bright morning, her chest heaving and her hands shaking, watching the blood drip down into the water. So much water that the blood was invisible after a moment, a brief bloom of red and then nothing. The vanishing drops felt like a symbol, but she couldn’t put words into what they meant. Adara bore matching marks on her face, cut with her own sharp claws and weeping gold that vanished before it hit the water.

The first time, she was alone, and bore the weight of Joe’s attentions on her shoulders like Atlas holding up the world. He came almost every night, enthralled with his new Splendid beauty, and Angharad thought she would find a way to spill the rest of her blood into the water. That’s what she was thinking about when she wandered into the main room, her feet numb and her heart dead, and found Cheedo waiting. A girl in the sunshine, hair dark as oil, eyes bright as star shine.

Angharad was young, and she was lonely, and she did not want to die. So she sat and talked with the little girl, who was clean and soft and had a daemon who changed into a giant anteater so he could flick Adara with his tongue until she batted him away (with her claws sheathed). And Angharad decided that she would live, if only for a little while.

But the clean pain called to her like water to the Wretched, and Angharad could not deny herself the cuts. They hurt, yes, and Joe’s anger hurt worse, and the presence of the Organic Mechanic was always unbearable when he came to stitch her up. But she could not stop, did not want to. She had so few things that belonged to her, nowadays, and this pain was one of them. She chose it, again and again.

The first time he’d caught Angharad with blood on her face, he’d put her in handcuffs until she rubbed her wrists raw, and picked away the scabs until there was more blood than ever in the Vault. Then he took her tools, took away everything sharp and left her only her fingers, nails long and pointed but terrible for cutting. But she had been Wretched, and the largesse of the Vault could be turned to any purpose she set her mind to. She broke a lamp and let her fingers slip on blood and glass. She twisted the wire of a bedspring into a cutting edge. She put her skin under her daemon’s heavy paws, and Adara always licked her face clean in long, rough strokes after pressing her claws through scarred skin. Adara loved her more than Aqua-Cola.

“He doesn’t own me. He wanted my face, so I took it from him,” she said later, when Capable asked.

“He doesn’t want your face _that_ much,” Toast drawled from her perch on the curve of the staircase, one foot hanging down to brush Tarl’s back where he lay on the cool stone floor. Toast was new then, afraid and mean with it. Her hair was starting to unravel from its multitude of tiny braids, but she would not have any of them touch it. Though the dust of the Wasteland had been long ago washed from her face, her skin kept a weathered, worn look that displeased Joe. It made Angharad jealous, but she would never say so. Besides, it wouldn’t last. New, softer skin was already replacing the calluses on Toast’s feet and palms. She would be smooth-skinned soon enough, though she would always be much darker than Angharad or Capable. “Or he would have thrown you away for ruining it.”

“We all do what we can,” Angharad shot back, her voice dry as the Wasteland.

Toast snorted. “None of you do enough. You never cut _him_ with your knives, do you?”

Excuses rose up Angharad’s throat like bile and she had to swallow them down, acid on her stomach, and Capable reached out, brushed careful fingertips over her upper arm. At that, Angharad could turn and smile, and at once the world shone clearer, her anger crystalized into words. If nothing else, she loved Capable for making sense of the burning that hovered always on the Angharad’s edges, waiting to eat her up.

“I’m not afraid of him,” she said, low, to both of them. “But if I kill him, there’ll just be another to take his place. One of the Imperators, or his monster sons. We might be worse off with him dead. I won’t risk it until I know it can change.”

But Angharad was Wretched, and she knew one truth deeper than the others: it would never change, and the Citadel was a monolith that would not crumble, even in the face of her burning.


End file.
